The last few paragraphs of the article really brought an interesting light onto the subject. Most of the people I know who left college to start a business or to work somewhere in Silicon Valley had a remarkably privileged upbringing. They never had the worries about the financial or temporal investment into an education or any experience taking risks. I'm not trying to berate people who drop out of college for these reasons, but it's an important factor to keep in mind when truly analyzing their success.
While there is a <lot> of truth in this statement, one notable exception is worth mentioning: steve jobs. who apparently quit school in part because he thought college was too much for his familiy to pay for.
But I think you are more right than wrong in your observation. There are a lot of soft social skills and such that you need for business that could be learned in school. May not be news to some depending on there background and natural talents, etc.
Easily: thanks to the development and maintenance of the US nuclear forces, the US will never enter into a direct military conflict with any other first-world country with nuclear weapons of its own. Thanks to the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction, what could have easily been a massively destructive total war between two superpowers was restricted to a half-century of posturing and proxy warfare, all of which killed at least an order of magnitude fewer people than would have died in a direct, total war.
No, it's not warm and fuzzy to think about things in this way, but we're not children and we don't have the luxury of idealistic naivety.
If anything, this article supports the claim that C++ is a good language. The fact that C++ templates are Turing-complete and allow for this kind of thing is pretty darn cool in my opinion.
Food for thought: That means whether an arbitrary c++ program compiles reduces to the halting problem.
I would wager that for the vast majority of real situations you'd be better off writing that in the primary language and either bundling the precomputed result when you package your application or running it at runtime.
I'm sure there is a small class of trivial exceptions, but no non-trivial ones.
I think a much better way to do this would be to send a confirmation email first. After the user accepts the confirmation email then it continues with the submission. This would prevent potentially evil stuff from happening.
Personally, I've never found Github's interface to be overwhelming at all. Sure they have a lot of content on every page, but I think it's well-designed enough where I can easily find what I'm looking for very quickly. For example, when I want to switch branches, looking for the drop down menu with the branching icon is all I have to do and I usually find it right away.
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - Edsger Dijkstra
The name of the field misleads a lot of people into thinking that CS is only about programming, but it's way more than that. Personally, I think all of my CS background from university is what distinguishes me as a software developer instead of just a "programmer".
> Personally, I think all of my CS background from university is what distinguishes me as a software developer instead of just a "programmer".
I consider myself a software developer because I work on the software from top to bottom. From business requirements, to user interface and usability design, to architecture and algorithms. Someone who is responsible for all aspects of code, but not other areas of the application's development, is a programmer to me.
It's funny how all these labels we throw around in the industry have no generally accepted definition.
I think 'Software Engineer' is thrown around too often.
That title should be reserved for those who pass (a currently nonexistent) certification like other professional engineers, and indicates that they are capable of working on life-critical systems like car software, medical systems, space shuttles, etc.
Unfortunately startups and web/mobile app companies may abuse this and require engineering certification for job openings when it's just unnecessary.
The differing mouse "feel" that you're describing is most likely a result of the different mouse acceleration curve that OS X uses. (Mentioned in the article) I've noticed this too but I was able to resolve it by changing the mouse acceleration curve using this tool: http://triq.net/articles/mouse-acceleration-preference-pane-... Now I think it feels just as nice as Windows.
Interesting that doctoral degrees do not pay more on average than professional ones! Perhaps it is because most PhD's enter the field of research as opposed to industry? I haven't met that many PhD's in industry but there are a few.
It doesn't say "PhDs", it says "Doctoral degrees", which may mean (it isn't clear), that EdD (Doctor of Education, a common degree for public school administrators), DBA (Doctor of Business Administration, usually from Harvard), EDB (Executive Doctor of Business, typically offered to already successful business people) and other similar specialized but not necessarily "professional" degrees (which I interpret to mean MD, JD, DDS, chiropractic, etc.) would be in this group.
I don't think he was trying to be insulting. From what I gather, he was trying to justify the negativity theme in the comments for this post, which was the subject of the original comment. I agree that the blog post was not detailed enough, and didn't talk enough about HOW you became a programmer in 12 weeks.
What kind of information do you mean? I programmed, asked questions, programmed, read source code, and programmed. There's zero magic. I learned in the same way all human beings learn.
We're knowledge workers. I gained enough programming knowledge to be a programmer. Where's the confusion?
Being a programmer myself, this is a bit theoretical but I think if I wasn't and I sat down to read an article names "How I became a Programmer", I would expect a couple of pointers to where to start, what to do and how to do it.
Besides from the point about learning a language rather than a framework, your post mostly says "It took me 12 week to learn programming" and that the way to do it is the obvious: read stuff, try stuff etc.
There is nothing wrong with this of course, but given the headline, especially here on HN, I can see why some might feel that they didn't quite get their money's worth.
Judging by the huge volume of emails and comments on the blog, retweets and all that good stuff the article generated, I feel pretty good about the article
I'd really like to create a start-up, and my partner and I have many ideas, but I feel like most start-ups out there today are playing the role of the third-party instead of creating truly revolutionary things. Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have the resources and backing to execute any idea that has a chance to change the industry. Compare this to a start-up, where if your imagination extends beyond what the iOS SDK or some web framework provides, then nine times out of ten, you're out of luck. I'm not saying that start-ups are completely incapable of becoming a first-party, but it's been a while since I've personally seen a truly revolutionary idea that can realistically be carried out by such a small group of people with little money.
